MiB II good, but more of the same

Men in Black ll

Director: Barry Sonnenfeld

Cast: Tommy Lee Jones, Will Smith, Lara Flynn Boyle, Rosario Dawson, Johnny Knoxville

Cert: PG.

As with all sequels, we have here a pale shadow of a memorable original. Merely, the same again.

It is not that MiBll is bad, it is certainly almost as good as what has gone before, rather that it does not carry the plot or the characters much further along the road of development.

Such is the recurring problem with similar films: Rocky was excellent but thereafter he merely fought for the title and either lost or won; 007 is excellent but the super cool agent merely dons his dinner-jacket, beds lots of beautiful women and saves the world; Crocodile Dundee, after the delight of a first meeting, is merely an Australian with a deeply-lined face and a big knife.

The Men in Black, thus, bring us nothing substantially new and get away with it simply because Jones and Smith make such a solid and engaging team and have been given some outstanding special F/X and a host of flesh-creeping aliens as back-up.

Here, then, Jones is brought back to the special agency charged with protecting Earth from the scum of the Universe - apparently 'they' are all around us intent on evil - and he and Smith wisecrack their way through what remains of a tissue-thin plot.

Along the way they come across shape-shifting Boyle whose mission is, as if you never suspected as much, to take over the world as we know it.

MiBll is not as good as MiB, it has the feel of performances telephoned in. There is still much left in the idea, it's just that every seems to have been a little lazy over this one.

Star Rating: ***++